Virtual machines are becoming increasingly prevalent and there are a number of commercial vendors and open source products providing or enabling virtual machine environments. Such enablement involves getting virtual machine monitors (hosts or VMMs) running on a variety of hardware platforms and then allowing virtual machines (guests or VMs) to run in those environments.
The VMs themselves are typically stored in vendor-version and implementation-specific formats, and there are utilities to create them and convert between the formats. Within a VM there are typically one or more virtual disks and some additional files containing description of the VM and the hardware it virtualizes, as well as some optional files like system snapshots of the VM at various stages of processing. There may also be a delta, difference, and undo/redo files for changes that are not committed to the VM virtual disks. In some grid environments (e.g., Globus®) there are the concepts of VM workspaces that contain virtual disks or partitions, one each for the operating system (OS), application, and the data.
One of the challenges in managing VMs is that VMs can be created in one vendor's environment, moved to another vendor's through a conversion utility, be moved between hosts (within a single vendor environment) during execution (e.g., VMware® VMotion, Microsoft® LiveMotion) and be snapshoted, copied, cloned, or templated. Each vendor, tool, and implementation has its own proprietary management instrumentation (e.g., VMware® has Virtual Center, VMI SDK, etc; Microsoft® has WMI, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, etc), its own repository, VM disk format, eventing technique and format, logging format and location, VM control file name and format. The formats may even differ within a single vendor's product family, as well as between versions of a product.
There are additional vendors like PlateSpin™ PowerConvert, Akimbi™ and Surgient® and others who provide tools and utilities that copy, transform, snapshot, template, manipulate and proliferate VMs within and between environments and formats. The original creator of a VM as well as anyone who wants to manage a VM has a very difficult task in determining who has the VM and is using it, which formats the VM has been converted to, and where and how many derivatives of the VM exist. Many enterprises are also trying to create and maintain central configuration management databases (CMDBs) which would have a very difficult time keeping up with all the VMs coming and going.
What is needed, therefore, are techniques for controlling and managing virtual machines and other such virtual systems.